She could not think why he should be worrying his mind about water when the bottles which they carried were full. Already she was uncomfortably conscious of the weight of her own. They crossed a second narrow donga, and then another: both dry. At a third, sheltered by a graceful screen of taller acacias, they found a bottom on which there was room for both of them to turn. The whistling of the frogs grew so shrill that it hurt their ears. In the middle of the donga no stream flowed; but caught in a series of shelving rock-pools a little of the water of the last rains had lodged. It smelt stale and was cloudy with the larvæ of mosquitoes.
“Now we had better drink,” he said.
“This?”
“Yes. It is not bad water.”
“But I’m not thirsty. And even if I were . . .”
“You must drink it all the same. We must keep the water in our bottles. We shall want that later. Drink as much as you can . . .”
He himself began to drink, ladling the stuff to his mouth with the curved palm of his hand. She had never seen anyone drink like that, and when she tried to imitate him she found that she spilt more than she drank. Nevertheless she managed to obey him, and now knew, for the first time, how parched her mouth was.
“Now we must get away from this,” he said. “This place must be alive with mosquitoes.”
Her wrists and ankles knew that already; but the tangle of swamps into which they had wandered was not so easily left. It must have taken them an hour or more to free themselves from its convolutions. When they merged at last into the open air and could see the moonlit sky, they settled down in the hollow of a dry river bed upon the edge of which the grass grew high and rank. The bank of this stream was strewn with fine sand and made a comfortable shelf on which to lie.
“I’m afraid you are tired,” he said. “You must be tired to death.”